It's worth noting that compiling the same code split up into separate crates compared to in a single crate will usually be faster due to the fact that cargo par

It's worth noting that compiling the same code split up into separate crates compared to in a single crate will usually be faster due to the fact that cargo parallelizes per crate. That doesn't mean that having fewer dependencies won't still potentially help due to reducing the total amount of code that needs to be compiled, or that you couldn't split up the code you're writing yourself into separate crates, but if you're looking to bring in a dependency, the number of transitive dependencies you'd be bringing in as a result isn't necessarily going to be a good heuristic for the amount of extra compile time you'd be adding. In particular, a lot of packages that provide a large amount of functionality are already split up by those developers and then "combined" into a single package that brings them in as dependencies for this exact reason. If they're doing this right, they'll often have these exposed via cargo features that you can disable is they're not needed, and I'd argue that before looking to entirely swap out a direct dependency they're currently using, it's worth checking if the "bloat" they're unhappy with is actually something they can just disable via the feature set in cargo. Notably, a lot of the "extra" stuff that people have mentioned elsewhere in this thread is stuff that you can potentially turn off when using clap for arg parsing; looking at the documentation[1] to refresh myself, you can opt out of any combination of output color, automatic help text generation, automatic usage documentation, additional context being added to errors, and automatic generation of suggestions when the command is invoked incorrectly, and some of the stuff like being able to derive implementations by default and specific support for Unicode is already off by default. [1]: https://docs.rs/clap/latest/clap/_features/index.html https://docs.rs/clap/latest/clap/_features/index.html